Ben Mildenhall is Co-Founder at World Labs, a spatial intelligence company building Large World Models to perceive, generate, and interact with the 3D world.

Ben earned his PhD in Computer Science from UC Berkeley in 2020, advised by Ren Ng and supported by a Hertz Fellowship. He previously worked as a Research Scientist at Google Research from 2021 to 2023, and completed his undergraduate degree at Stanford University.

Ben is the co-creator of NeRF (Neural Radiance Fields), a breakthrough in 3D neural rendering that has been cited over 45,000 times. He received an ACM Doctoral Dissertation Award Honorable Mention in 2021 for his pioneering work on neural scene representations.

World Labs raised $1 billion in February 2026 from investors including AMD, Autodesk, Emerson Collective, Fidelity, NVIDIA, and Sea, following a $230 million round in September 2024. The company launched Marble, its first commercial product for generating 3D worlds from images or text, in November 2024.

Ben's research in computer vision and graphics has fundamentally transformed how AI systems understand and generate 3D environments. World Labs achieved unicorn status within its first four months and is valued at approximately $5 billion as of early 2026.